Elisabeth Massie connects on some things and misses on others in her first and only entry in the “Buffy” young-adult line, “Power of Persuasion” (October 1999). When she lets the dialog flow naturally, we get witty exchanges. Joyce asks Buffy if that was Willow on the phone. Since Willow is possessed at the time, Buffy says “Sort of.” But Massie also overuses “much,” thinking it’s a shortcut to Slayerette-speak, like Cordy saying “I got first runner-up! Wrong much? Totally inept judging much?”
Set in the spring of Season 3 (without any continuity contradictions, refreshingly), “Power of Persuasion” deserves credit for having a plot that wasn’t found in a TV episode: A mother and two daughters come to Sunnydale pushing an archaic form of feminism wherein the women aim to kill or subjugate all the men. Since Mo Moon and her daughters, Calli and Polly, can supernaturally control people, this leads to chaos at Sunnydale High, as shy girl Allison wants to try out for the boys’ basketball team and boys later want to compete in the Miss Sunnydale High Pageant.
Massie starts off with the strong idea of focusing on her own creation, Allison, but abandons it. The main heroes, weirdly, end up being Buffy, Oz and Cordelia, since Willow, Xander and Giles are possessed and out of commission. In a nice nod to Season 2’s “What’s My Line,” where Oz learns he has computer aptitude, Oz takes over the Willow role at the keyboard. (On a side note, it’s interesting that in these late-’90s books, researching something on the internet is a huge hurdle that only Willow has mastered. It’s not inaccurate by any means, but it’s fascinating to think how quickly everyone’s habits changed in 20 years.)
With the team short-handed, it’s fun to see Buffy resort to ways of gathering information that aren’t seen too much on the show, such as breaking into a morgue to examine corpses and going all “Veronica Mars” and trying to finagle an autopsy report out of the police.
At times, Massie’s feel for Sunnydale is off, as she invents a private school (the TV show strongly implies one high school and one community college). The gang of vampires harassing Buffy in “Power of Persuasion” are all decades or centuries old, inconsistent with the usual portrayal of Sunnydale’s small fry. Their leader, Viva, gets away at the end, so perhaps Massie intended to make her a bigger baddie in future stories that never came about.
The author has a generous sense of how many stories can fit into Season 3, as she references Giles sending Angel to investigate a mysterious cave out of town (thus explaining his absence from this story). When he returns, he tells Buffy “Bad things are coming our way. I’ll tell you all about it.” But if that’s a tie-in to another story, I’m not aware of it off hand. Again, maybe Massie was setting up a potential next yarn.
The “Buffy” authors don’t seem to have a lot of interest in what other authors are doing in the Pocket Books line, as their stories don’t reference each other, and they often contradict each other. For example, the gang is surprised to learn the Moons are gods, something they supposedly haven’t faced before. But they did face gods in “Blooded,” set in the fall of Season 3.
Other continuity touches work well. “Power of Persuasion” is the first book appearance of Anya, and Massie nails the ex-vengeance demon’s personality. At first Anya is intrigued by what the Moons are planning, but she ultimately rejects them as small-timers. And I admire Massie’s attempt to bring Hank Summers into the narrative (at a point when the TV show basically forgot he existed), as Buffy must choose between a weekend with her mom or with her dad.
Overall, Massie shows potential as an imaginative “Buffy” writer, and I wouldn’t have minded reading more from her, but this effort is uneven.
Click here for an index of all of John’s “Buffy” and “Angel” reviews.